Symmetric Key Based Authentication Mechanism for Secure Communication in MANETs

Abstract

In MANETs, secure communication is very difficult to achieve because its nature-like communication medium is open wireless which can be easily accessed by anyone who comes in the radio range of the communicating devices, nodes are physically vulnerable, less-efficient (processing power, memory) communicating devices, the absence of central authority, free from the constraint of topological structure of network, etc. In last decade, applications of MANETs are increasing rapidly. Most of the application demands the secure communication of information. In this work, symmetric key based authentication mechanism has been proposed to ensure the secure communication between the communicating parties. The proposed model secures the network from the well known and frequently occurred attacks (impersonation, modifies routing information, black hole). In this work, two levels of authentication have been used, first level for hop-to-hop authentication (MD5 algorithm has been used for authentication code generation) and second level for end-to-end authentication (SHA1 algorithm has for authentication code generation). For the simulation purpose, AODV protocol is used for checking the effectiveness of the proposed model and PDR; AE2ED and TP are used to measure the performance of the proposed, AODV and existing models in the absence and presence of the malicious nodes. NS2.35 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with 4 GB RAM is used for simulation. Simulation results show the advantage of proposed model over the original AODV and some related models published recently. A result showing our model implements the security scheme with less overhead.